Editors
Toyin Falola, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin,
Akintunde Akinyemi, Department of languages, Literatures, and Cultures, University of Florida, Gainesville
Arinpe Adejumo, Department of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan, Nigeria
The Yoruba Studies Review is published twice during the academic year, in the fall (October) and spring (April) semesters respectively.
Funso Aiyejina, professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Trinidad and Tobago where he served as the Dean of Humanities and Education. He is a poet, short story writer, and playwright. His collection of short fiction, The legend of the Rockhills and Other Stories, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book (Africa). He also won the Association of Nigeria Authors’ Poetry Prize in 1989 for his first book of poetry, A letter to Lynda and Other Poems (1988). Professor Aiyejina’s poetry and short stories have been published in many international journals and anthologies including The Anchor Book of African Stories for Mediation, The new out Borders, Kiss and Quarrel: Yoruba/English- Strategies for Mediation, The new African Poetry, and The penguin Book of Modern African Poetry. His stories and plays have been read and dramatized on the radio in Nigeria and England. Professor Aiyejina is a widely published critic on African and West Indian Literature and Culture.
Michele Reid-Vazquez, assistant professor in the Department of African Studies, University of Pittsburgh. Her research and teaching focus on the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World History, with an emphasis on late eighteenth to early twentieth century, particularly the comparative Caribbean (Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, and Trinidad), the African Diaspora in Latin America, race and gender relations, immigration and identity during the age of revolution. She is author of The year of the lash: free People of color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Her on –going project on Caribbean Crossings: Comparative Black Emigration and freedom in the Age of Revolution explores the ways in which the American, Haitian, and Spanish American revolution sparked multiple black emigration movements.
Joao Jose Reis, professor of History at the Universidade Federal da Bahia in Brazil. He received his PhD in History from the University of Minnesota. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor), Princeton, Brandeis, Texas (Austin), and Harvard. He also been a research fellow at the University of London, the Centre for Advanced Studies in the behavioral Sciences (Stanford), and the National Humanities Centre. Reis’ books in English include Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The 1835 Muslim Revolt in Bahia (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), Death is a festival: Funeral Rites and Rebellion in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (North Carolina, 2003), and Divining Slavery: An African Priest in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Cambridge University Press, 2015), and Alufaa Rufino, a Muslim African in the Black Atlantic (c. 1822-c. 1853) (Oxford U. Press, forthcoming 2016-17), co-authored with Flavio Gomes and Marcus Carvalho. Professor Reis is currently working on his third biography of an African who lived in Bahia as a slave and then a freeman.
Robert Simon, professor of Portuguese and Spanish at Kennesaw State University where he currently serves as the coordinator of the Department of Foreign Language Portuguese Program. He has academic degrees and certificates in the United States, Spain, and Portugal. He has taught both Spanish and Portuguese languages, and investigated the presence of surrealism, mysticism, and postmodernism, the un-centered subject, and the notion of the paradigm shift through literatures (African literatures in Portuguese language), particularly Contemporary Angolan poetry, as well as on the presence of the Postcolonial voice in Iberian poetics. His own original poetry, composed in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, elaborates on the themes of love, travel, and self-imposed barriers to interpersonal relationships and communication. His academic publications include Understanding the Portuguese Poet Joaquin Pessoa, 1942-2007: A study in Iberian Cultural Hybridity.
George Alao is in the African Department of the French National Institute for Oriental Language and Civilisations (INALCO), Paris, France and a member of the French Research team Equipe d’Accueil (EA 4514 PLIDAM) Pluralite des Langues et des Identities: Didactique, Acquisition, Mediations. He holds a doctoral degree in the area of comperative African Literature from Universite Rennes 2 – Haute Bretagne in France and is presently teaching Yoruba language and culture at INALCO in Paris. Dr Alao’s current research interests include second language acquisition, multilingualism and multiculturalism, media and pedagogy, and contemporary Yoruba Diaspora.
Tunde Ajiboye is professor in the Department of French, University of Ilorin, Nigeria. He had his first degree from University of Ibadan where he was awarded a first Class (Honors) in France 1974. He subsequently went for a doctorate at Universite de Nancy II, Nancy, France where he had a doctorat de 3e cycle in linguistique appliqué in 1978. He started his university teaching career at Obafemi Awolowo University (then University of Ife), Ile-Ife, Nigeria in 1976 as a Graduate Assistant in the Department of Foreign Languages. He later moved in 1986 to the University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria where he became Professor of French in October 1990. Professor Ajiboye has published a long list of books and journal articles. His research interests in peace studies include the nexus between language, communication and conflict. He teaches Language and communication at the centre for peace and Strategic Studies.
Karin Barber is professor of Cultural Anthropology at the Centre for West African Studies, University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. She is internationally recognized as a leading scholar in the fields of Yoruba oral and written literature, Yoruba religions ideas and practices, and Yoruba popular traveling theater. Her principle research interests are the sociology of literature and popular culture, with special reference to the Yoruba-speaking people of Nigeria. Dr Barber has published widely in the field of Yoruba, oral literature, and popular culture. Her book I Could Speak Until Tomorrow: Oriki, Women and the past in a Yoruba Town (1991), which won the Amaury Talbot Prize for African Anthropology, awarded by the Royal Anthropological Institute, has been hailed as ‘truly innovative.’ She is also of The Generation of Plays: Yoruba Popular life in Theatre (2000), which won the international Herskovits Award for the most important scholarly work in African Studies published in English. Among Dr Barber’s other books are Yoruba Popular Theatre: Three Plays by the Oyin Adejobi Company (1994) and The Anthropology of Texts, Persons, and Publics: Oral and written Culture in African and Beyond (2007). She is also the editor of West African Popular Theatre, (1997), African’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literature and making the Self (2006), Print Culture and the First Yoruba Novel: I. B Thomas’s Life Story of Me, Segilola’ and Other Texts (2012), and Africa, the journal of the International African Institute.
Akinnyi Akinlabi is professor of linguistics at the Rutgers University and President, World Congress of African Linguistics. His research interest areas include phonology (phonology – tone, harmony, prosodic structure, underspecification theory); morphology (phonology Interaction, prosodic morphology); Optimality Theory; and West African Linguistics, especially of Benue-Congo languages. He is the author of Yoruba: A phonological Grammar and editor of Theoretical Approaches to African Linguistics. His other publications have appeared in such professional journals as Linguistics, Inquiry, Lingua, Canadian Journal of linguistics, Studies in African Linguistics, Journal of African Languages and Linguistics, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, and the Journal of West African Languages, among others.
Editorial Assistants and Business Managers
Khumo Nicole Senuku <khumo.senuku@ufl.edu> (Gainesville, USA)
Luis Cataido <luiscataldo23@utexas.edu> (Austin, USA)
Adeshina Afolayan adeshinaafolayan@gmail.com (Ibadan, Nigeria)
Editorial and Publishing Liaison
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